Adaptive voice frequency repeaters which employ echo cancelers to maximize return loss, or, stated another way, to minimize reflected signals, tend to be susceptible to spurious signals. These spurious signals may be ringing, dial pulses, lightning hits, power line crosses or other "large" amplitude signals having significant harmonic content.
Ringing signals, for example, are not necessarily "pure" sine waves. The ringing signal is nominally a 20 Hz signal and may be generated in numerous ways including harmonic generators, square wave generators or the like. Consequently, the ringing signal may have numerous large amplitude harmonics which fall within the voice frequency band, i.e., between 200 Hz and 3200 Hz. Similarly, the voltage waveform of dial pulses, which may range from 7.5 pulses per second (pps) to 12.5 pps, is also rich in harmonic content.
The echo cancelers used in voice frequency repeaters typically have a limited number of "taps", i.e., amplitude coefficients, to generate an impulse response characteristic which matches the echo path characteristic caused by a 2-wire bidirectional facility connected to the repeater. Because of the large amplitude harmonics in the ringing, dial pulses and other similar signals, the echo canceler tends to adapt to an undesirable impulse response characteristic which, in turn, does not necessarily result in the desired maximum return loss for the "normal" voice frequency signals, for example, voice and white noise.